An eccentric comic about the central mystery of quantum mechanics\nTotally Random is a comic for the serious reader who wants to really understand the central mystery of quantum mechanics--entanglement: what it is, what it means, and what you can do with it.\nMeasure two entangled particles separately, and the outcomes are totally random. But compare the outcomes, and the particles seem as if they are instantaneously influencing each other at a distance―even if they are light-years apart. This, in a nutshell, is entanglement, and if it seems weird, then this book is for you. Totally Random is a graphic experiential narrative that unpacks the deep and insidious significance of the curious correlation between entangled particles to deliver a gut-feel glimpse of a world that is not what it seems. See for yourself how entanglement has led some of the greatest thinkers of our time to talk about crazy-sounding stuff like faster-than-light signaling, many worlds, and cats that are both dead and alive. Find out why it remains one of science's most paradigm-shaking discoveries. Join Niels Bohr's therapy session with the likes of Einstein, Schrödinger, and other luminaries and let go of your commonsense notion of how the world works. Use your new understanding of entanglement to do the seemingly impossible, like beat the odds in the quantum casino, or quantum encrypt a message to evade the Sphinx's all-seeing eye. But look out, or you might just get teleported back to the beginning of the book!\nA fresh and subversive look at our quantum world with some seriously funny stuff, Totally Random delivers a real understanding of entanglement that will completely change the way you think about the nature of physical reality.
An eccentric comic about the central mystery of quantum mechanics\nTotally Random is a comic for the serious reader who wants to really understand the central mystery of quantum mechanics--entanglement: what it is, what it means, and what you can do with it.\nMeasure two entangled particles separately, and the outcomes are totally random. But compare the outcomes, and the particles seem as if they are instantaneously influencing each other at a distance―even if they are light-years apart. This, in a nutshell, is entanglement, and if it seems weird, then this book is for you. Totally Random is a graphic experiential narrative that unpacks the deep and insidious significance of the curious correlation between entangled particles to deliver a gut-feel glimpse of a world that is not what it seems. See for yourself how entanglement has led some of the greatest thinkers of our time to talk about crazy-sounding stuff like faster-than-light signaling, many worlds, and cats that are both dead and alive. Find out why it remains one of science's most paradigm-shaking discoveries. Join Niels Bohr's therapy session with the likes of Einstein, Schrödinger, and other luminaries and let go of your commonsense notion of how the world works. Use your new understanding of entanglement to do the seemingly impossible, like beat the odds in the quantum casino, or quantum encrypt a message to evade the Sphinx's all-seeing eye. But look out, or you might just get teleported back to the beginning of the book!\nA fresh and subversive look at our quantum world with some seriously funny stuff, Totally Random delivers a real understanding of entanglement that will completely change the way you think about the nature of physical reality.
This is an extended essay review of Tanya and Jeffrey Bub's Totally Random: Why Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics: A serious comic on entanglement. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press (2018), ISBN: 9780691176956, 272 pp., 7x10 in., 254 b/w illus., £18.99 / $22.95 (paperback). We review the philosophical aspects of the book, provide suggestions for instructors on how to use the book in a class setting, and evaluate the authors' artistic choices in the context of comics theory.
“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” Since Niels Bohr said this many years ago, quantum mechanics has only been getting more shocking. We now realize that it’s not really telling us that “weird” things happen out of sight, on the tiniest level, in the atomic world. Rather, we can now see that everything is quantum: our everyday world is simply what quantum becomes at the human scale. But if quantum mechanics is right, what seems obvious and right in our everyday world is built on foundations that don’t seems obvious or right—or even possible. An exhilarating tour of the contemporary quantum landscape, Beyond Weird is a book about what quantum physics really means—and what it doesn’t. Science writer Philip Ball offers an up-to-date, accessible account of the quest to come to grips with the most fundamental theory of physical reality, and to explain how its counterintuitive principles underpin the world we experience. Over the past decade it has become clear that quantum physics is less a theory about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information and knowledge—about what can be known, and how we know it. Discoveries and experiments over the past few decades have called into question the meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and, ultimately, of knowledge itself. The quantum world Ball shows us isn’t a different world. It is our world, and if anything deserves to be called “weird,” it’s us.
Richard Feynman famously declared, "I think that I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics." Sean Carroll lamented the persistence of this sentiment in a recent opinion piece entitled, "Even Physicists Don't Understand Quantum Mechanics. Worse, they don't seem to want to understand it." Quantum mechanics is arguably the greatest achievement of modern science and by and large we absolutely understand quantum theory. Rather, the "understanding" to which these two statements evidently refer concerns the ontological status of theoretical constructs. For example, "Do quantum wave functions accurately depict physical reality?" The quantum measurement problems represents a collection of such queries and the conundrums to which they lead. Most physicists are content with foregoing such metaphysical issues, falling back on Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, and then get on with the business of doing physics. I suspect that Carroll would criticize these physicists as being too dismissive of the wonderful mysteries of quantum mechanics by relegating its role to that of an algorithm for making predictions. Quite to the contrary, I maintain that those who still pursue a resolution to the measurement problem are burdened with a classical view of reality and fail to truly embrace the fundamental quantum aspects of nature.
Quantum mechanics allows a remarkably accurate description of nature and powerful predictive capabilities. The analyses of quantum systems and their interpretation lead to many surprises, for example, the ability to detect the characteristics of an object without ever touching it in any way, via "interaction-free measurement," or the teleportation of an atomic state over large distances. The results can become downright bizarre. Quantum mechanics is a subtle subject that usually involves complicated mathematics -- calculus, partial differential equations, etc., for complete understanding. Most texts for general audiences avoid all mathematics. The result is that the reader misses almost all deep understanding of the subject, much of which can be probed with just high-school level algebra and trigonometry. Thus, readers with that level of mathematics can learn so much more about this fundamental science. The book starts with a discussion of the basic physics of waves (an appendix reviews some necessary classical physics concepts) and then introduces the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, including the wave function, superposition, entanglement, Bell's theorem, etc., and applications to Bose--Einstein condensation, quantum computing, and much more. The interpretation of the mathematics of quantum mechanics into a world view has been the subject of much controversy. The result is a variety of conflicting interpretations, from the famous Copenhagen view of Bohr to the multiple universes of Everett. We discuss these interpretations in the chapter "What is a wave function?" and include some very recent advances, for example, quantum Bayesianism, and measurements of the reality of the wave function.
[I] think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law Quantum mechanics [is] that mysterious, confusing discipline, which none of us really understands but which we know how to use. It works perfectly, as far as we can tell, in describing physical reality, but it is a ‘counter-intuitive discipline’… Murray Gell-Mann, Questions for the Future [The quantum] postulate implies a renunciation as regards the causal space-time co-ordination of atomic processes. Niels Bohr, Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature It should be emphasized, however, that the probability function does not in itself represent a course of events in the course of time. It represents a tendency for events and our knowledge of events. The probability function can be connected with reality only if one essential condition is fulfilled: if a new measurement is made to determine a certain property of the system. [T]he idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist, independently of whether or not we observe them…is impossible … Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy [In] quantum theory it is the principle of causality , or more accurately that of determinism , which must be dropped and replaced by something else.… We now have a new form of the law of causality.… It is as follows: if in a certain process the initial conditions are determined as accurately as the uncertainty relations permit, then the probabilities of all possible subsequent states are governed by exact laws. Max Born, The Restless Universe
An exploration of quantum entanglement and the ways in which it contradicts our everyday assumptions about the ultimate nature of reality. Quantum physics is notable for its brazen defiance of common sense. (Think of Schrödinger's Cat, famously both dead and alive.) An especially rigorous form of quantum contradiction occurs in experiments with entangled particles. Our common assumption is that objects have properties whether or not anyone is observing them, and the measurement of one can't affect the other. Quantum entanglement—called by Einstein “spooky action at a distance”—rejects this assumption, offering impeccable reasoning and irrefutable evidence of the opposite. Is quantum entanglement mystical, or just mystifying? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Jed Brody equips readers to decide for themselves. He explains how our commonsense assumptions impose constraints—from which entangled particles break free. Brody explores such concepts as local realism, Bell's inequality, polarization, time dilation, and special relativity. He introduces readers to imaginary physicists Alice and Bob and their photon analyses; points out that it's easier to reject falsehood than establish the truth; and reports that some physicists explain entanglement by arguing that we live in a cross-section of a higher-dimensional reality. He examines a variety of viewpoints held by physicists, including quantum decoherence, Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, genuine fortuitousness, and QBism. This relatively recent interpretation, an abbreviation of “quantum Bayesianism,” holds that there's no such thing as an absolutely accurate, objective probability “out there,” that quantum mechanical probabilities are subjective judgments, and there's no “action at a distance,” spooky or otherwise.